GPT-4.1 Beats GPT-4o at Just 20% of Cost

Today’s top AI Highlights:

1. Build cool AI agents, win up to $20,000 in cash and credits

2. OpenAI’s new GPT-4.1 models outperform GPT-4o but cost 80% less

3. Stateful serverless framework for AI agent, collaborative, or local-first apps

4. AI agents can now debug code like real programmers

5. Use multiple AI agent frameworks with a single interface

& so much more!

Read time: 3 mins

🚨 Open Source AI Agent Hackathon! 🚨

The Global Open Source AI Agent Hackathon officially kicks off today! We at Unwind AI are thrilled to launch this initiative alongside fantastic ecosystem partners like Agno, Firecrawl, Browser Use, Graphlit, and Mem0. This is a dedicated space for developers like you to spend the next month building practical applications with AI agents, RAG, and tool use.

The hackathon runs until May 30th with $20,000+ in cash prizes up for grabs. Winners will not only receive cash rewards but also gain visibility in the AI community through featured placement on our popular Awesome LLM Apps repository.

It's time to get hands-on and show the community what you can create with the latest agentic AI tech.

📌 $20,000+ Cash Prize Pool: Compete for significant cash prizes, distributed ongoing throughout the event.

• 🏅 10 winners: $300 each

• 🥉 10 winners: $500 each

• 🥈 5 winners: $1,000 each

• 🥇 1 winner: $2,000

• 🏆 GRAND PRIZE: $5,000 🏆

📌 Major Visibility: Top 5 projects get featured in our Awesome LLM Apps repo (now 28k+ stars & often #1 trending on GitHub!).

📌 Build What Matters: Focus specifically on creating AI Agents, RAG systems, Tool-Using Agents, or Multi-Agent systems.

📌 Top Partner Integrations: Get recognized for utilizing tech from leading partners like Agno, Firecrawl, Mem0, Graphlit, Lutra AI, and Browser Use.

📌 Open to Everyone: No entry barriers for individual developers, teams, or startups—all you need is the technical skills and a vision for how agents can deliver practical value.

Ready to participate? Get started by submitting your project idea via a GitHub issue following the provided template. You can find all the competition details, judging criteria, and submission guidelines here: Global Agent Hackathon 

Latest Developments

OpenAI’s 3 New Models for Developers 👩‍💻💪

OpenAI just released three new models – GPT-4.1, GPT-4.1 mini, and GPT-4.1 nano – with major improvements that you will definitely want to check out. These models outperform GPT-4o across the board but particularly shine in coding, instruction following, and long context. The lineup ranges from the powerful GPT-4.1 to the efficient GPT-4.1 mini (often matching GPT-4o intelligence) and the very fast GPT-4.1 nano, designed for speed-sensitive applications.

They support massive context windows (1 million tokens) and come with updated knowledge through June 2024. The models were specifically trained with real-world developer utility in mind to optimize for tasks that matter most in practical applications. And the best part? They're significantly cheaper than previous models.

Key Highlights:

1. Coding & Reliability - GPT-4.1 shows major gains on benchmarks like SWE-bench and Aider's polyglot diffs, outperforming GPT-4o, o3-mini, and even o1 with significant margins. Expect better code generation, more reliable application of diff formats, fewer extraneous code edits, and improved performance for agentic coding workflows.

2. Massive 1M Token Context - All three new models (4.1, mini, nano) can process up to 1 million tokens, dramatically up from GPT-4o's 128k limit. OpenAI emphasizes improved reliability in retrieving and using information across this entire extended context, crucial for RAG over large codebases or extensive documentation sets.

3. Instruction Following - The models adhere more accurately to complex, multi-step, and negative instructions. This is vital for building more dependable AI agents, ensuring consistent tool usage, and getting precise output formatting when needed.

4. GPT-4.1 Mini & Nano Offer Strong Value - Mini matches or beats GPT-4o intelligence on many evaluations while offering nearly half the latency and costing 83% less. Nano is the fastest/cheapest option, surprisingly capable (e.g., 80.1% on MMLU, 1M context) and suitable for tasks needing high speed like classification or real-time autocompletion.

5. API and Pricing - These models are currently API-only (not directly in the standard ChatGPT interface). Updated pricing is in effect (e.g., GPT-4.1 at $2 input / $8 output per 1M tokens), alongside an increased 75% prompt caching discount and a 50% Batch API discount. OpenAI has collaborated with Windsurf to provide these models unlimited for free for the next 7 days, and thereafter will be available at a heavy discount.

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Stateful Serverless That Runs Anywhere 🧠🌐🚀

ActorCore is a new stateful serverless framework that lets you build applications with persistent state without managing databases or worrying about timeouts. You can deploy your code to multiple platforms like Rivet, Cloudflare, Bun, and Node.js, eliminating vendor lock-in concerns that often come with adopting stateful serverless architecture. ActorCore treats each unit of compute as a tiny server that remembers things between requests, making it ideal for building AI agents, collaborative apps, or local-first applications.

Key Highlights:

1. Built-in State Management - Your code's state saves automatically without needing databases, ORMs, or complex configurations. Just use regular JavaScript objects, and ActorCore handles persistence across restarts, upgrades, and crashes.

2. Ultra-Fast Performance - State lives on the same machine as your compute, eliminating database round trips and latency spikes. This architecture delivers lightning-quick reads and writes perfect for time-sensitive applications.

3. Simple Realtime Updates - Broadcast changes to connected clients without setting up external pub/sub systems or polling mechanisms. The built-in event system provides low-latency communication between clients and actors.

4. Cross-Platform Compatibility - Deploy to Rivet, Cloudflare, Bun, Node.js and more with the same codebase. This flexibility reduces vendor lock-in concerns and lets you choose the platform that best fits your needs.

Quick Bites

Microsoft has released Debug-gym, a new environment where AI coding agents can learn interactive debugging skills just like human developers. It gives code-repairing agents access to debugging tools like pdb to set breakpoints, navigate code, print variable values, and create test functions—addressing a key limitation of current AI coding agents that fail when bugs require context beyond available code and error messages. The fixes proposed by a coding agent with this will be grounded in the context of the relevant codebase, program execution, and documentation. Debug-gym is available now on GitHub with documentation, benchmarks, and a technical report.

The popular open-source coding agent Aider has just launched Navigator Mode - bringing autonomous coding capabilities just like Anthropic's Claude Code to Aider. The new mode lets Aider test tools, rename code parts, and add features autonomously when activated with --navigator or /navigator. It works with Aider's existing features like web UI and watch mode, with best performance on Gemini 2.5 Pro.

OpenAI is introducing a "Verified Organization" process that will require developers to complete ID verification to access certain advanced AI models. The verification requires a government-issued ID that can only verify one organization every 90 days, with not all organizations qualifying. This security measure aims to prevent policy violations while maintaining access for the broader developer community.

Tools of the Trade

1. any-agent: Python library providing a unified interface to multiple agent frameworks including Google ADK, LangChain, LlamaIndex, OpenAI Agents SDK, and smolagents. Easily switch between different agent frameworks without changing code.

2. Rabbitholes AI: A canvas-first node-based chat app that allows users to have multiple connected conversations with various AI models on one infinite canvas. Great for having exploratory conversations without the models losing context.

3. Presubmit: An open-source AI code reviewer that integrates with your GitHub to automatically analyze pull requests, providing instant feedback on bugs, security issues, and optimization opportunities directly within your GitHub workflow. Install in just 2 minutes.

4. Awesome LLM Apps: Build awesome LLM apps with RAG, AI agents, and more to interact with data sources like GitHub, Gmail, PDFs, and YouTube videos, and automate complex work.

Hot Takes

1. AI-free experiences might soon become something we start advertising and selling.
   A "handmade" of sorts. It might even be a huge selling point for many. ~
   Santiago
   
   

2. you think mira's $2B seed round is insane because you don't understand the following:
   AGI is what money wishes it was
   money is power when humans agree to it as a means of exchange. and agi is just power (no agreement necessary).
   so, obviously, all money will flow to AGI ~

   Daniel Faggella

That’s all for today! See you tomorrow with more such AI-filled content.

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